updates!!

Okay, finally back, and with a couple of updates for you:

1. For all those who lent a prayer to help my friend with her job interview, I'm excited to say that the school has offered her a job. It's actually not the job she first applied for, but what's good about that is that the original job was apparently filling in for someone on maternity leave. With this job they indicated they would have her fulfill various roles for the first school year to figure out where she fits in their school best and then move her into that position. I think the nice thing about that is the sense that they want to keep her, not just for a year, but as an ongoing member of their school community. Anyway, all those details aside, it is a nice school and pays more and won't wear her out - and all of that is FABULOUS!

2. Remember when I said I'd found that one of my favourite authors has a blog. Well I never did get back to telling you that the author in question is Neil Gaiman. He's a guy with a vivid and sometimes dark imagination who tells stories in a variety of ways: novels, graphic novels, tv and movie screenplays, poems. I won't make a huge list of his works, because Google can do that in a fraction of the time it would take me to type it. I have already mentioned one of his books, Anansi Boys, in a previous post. The blog has been an exciting read, because he gives info on his current projects and right now he has a lot going on. One of his novels, Stardust, is being made into a movie and the cast list is impressive so it should get good publicity. He wrote it as a fairy tale for adults and it was beautiful to read. A somewhat scary novel he wrote for children, Coraline, is being adapted into an animated film with Dakota Fanning providing the voice for the title character. There are creepy people in it with black button eyes. /shudder/ He also co-wrote a picture book called Wolves in the Walls that has just been turned into a play in Scotland and is getting great reviews. Right now I'm reading a collection of his short stories called Smoke & Mirrors. There are a lot of dark tales and characters so realistic you're sure you've met someone just like that before. I think that's maybe what I like most about his stories; he combines the real and the surreal and it's sometimes really hard to see where the seams are.

But here's the most exciting news I've read on his blog recently ~ he's coming to Sydney Writers' Week in May!!! Last time he was in Sydney it was on a Wednesday. I read about it on the Saturday prior, on a little notice in Kinokuniya (bookstore) in George St. It was so disappointing, because I knew I was leaving Sydney the next day and that there was just no chance I could get the bus fare OR the time off work to go back to Sydney again only three days later. So this time I took no chances. I Googled the Writers' Week schedule, figured out when I wanted to go see him, emailed a leave request to my boss and booked my bus tickets all within ten minutes. ^_^ Now I just have to decide which book to take for him to sign...